Z Man?

Not to post gossip, but even unsourced I suspect that this is legit. There hasn't been a Z-man post today, which is unusual, because on Friday's he usually posts pretty early; around 8 AM. I shrugged and figured that he was just a little late, and decided to look at Anonymous Conservative's blog instead, since he's a pretty good news aggregator if you can get past some of his strange monomanias. One of the very first things on his blog for today was a link to RAMZPAUL's twitter post saying that the Z-man had been found dead of natural causes this morning!

I still would like to get a better source than just a twitter account of an online friend/correspondent of the Z-man, but I believe he's probably right, and I doubt he'd even post that if he wasn't.

Pretty sad. He wasn't even 60, I don't think. He had been on my reading list pretty much daily for many years. While I didn't always agree with everything that he said, he was pretty sharp, and pretty articulate, and often said things in a way that I felt were very shareable. Not that I didn't already understand the concept, but I sometimes struggled to articulate it. The Z-man was pithy and insightful, so he filled in a gap of something that I couldn't do well myself. And sometimes, of course, he connected dots in a way that I hadn't ever thought of.

Of course I didn't know him. I don't even know his name, and I only divined his age from a few posts he made on it, and I heard a rumor that he lived in West Virginia, or had recently relocated there from the Baltimore area. (Maybe he still worked in Baltimore and commuted or worked remotely. Don't even know.)

Either way, no doubt he'll be missed by his friends and family, and his content will certainly be missed by many, including me, at least some of my sons and my son-in-law who I know also read him regularly.

UPDATE: Confirmed separately by John Derbyshire, who oughtta know, given that the Z-man hosted his show until just a few weeks ago.

Back in town after a longish trip, so I'll get caught up at work and see what in the world I actually want to blog about after that. Haven't read much lately, so not that, I'm afraid.

High Fantasy X

Coming up with setting/game titles is one of the hardest things for me; I've been using ChatGPT to help out. After much trial and error with it, that's how I got Shadows of Old Night, for instance. I'm looking to attempt the same thing with the High Fantasy X temporary titles. I'll put some of the most promising results here, noodle around with them, maybe mix and match them somewhat, and then decide if any of them actually work:

Blades of the Wild Realms

Heroes Unbound

No Cause But Glory

Tales of the Fearless Few

The World Gates Open

The Hollow Tide

Rebels of the Wild March

Rise of the Redhanded

Honor Among the Damned

Blades of the Broken Banners

Legends of the Lost Kingdom

Echoes of Forgotten Glory

Where Magic Still Churns

Walkers on the Wounded Earth

None of those is ready for primetime, and those were the best results of many queries (until I ran out of queries to make; I don't have a subscription.) I could mix and match some of these ideas and get stuff like Blades of the Wounded Earth (which I like) or something like that, but I may need to do another round of queries once it resets. None of these are really popping for me right now. Maybe after some time, they'll look better.

Meanwhile, I said a post or two ago that I wanted to add a Droaam and Q'barra analog to the map. I changed my mind. No I don't. Or rather, those won't be kingdoms, although they might well be regions; more like Apacheria or Comancheria rather than a kingdom in a recognized and traditional sense; enemies lurking in the wilderness rather than in the kingdom next door. Rather than creating a new map with new places on it, I want to redraw my existing map and maybe just add some more details to it. If I draw it on the larger of my sketch pads, I can have room to play around a little bit.

I'm traveling again next week on vacation, but maybe I'll get a chance to do this before I leave. If not, it'll be a little while until I can do so.

UPDATE: Possible name and banner? Let's try this out for a little while...

And just for good measure; here's a list of the current available races. First, from Shadows of Old Night:

Human, Grisling (Hyperborean), Kemling, Orc, Goblin, Surtur, Sylph, Triton, Dverg with Dhampir, Seraph and Woodwose in the Appendix

For High Fantasy X, we have:

Humans, Elves, Dwarfs, Orcs, Goblins, Kemlings, Surturs, Tritons, Sylphs, Dvergs and Grislings.

The COMBINED list is Human Grisling, Kemling, Elf, Dwarf, Orc, Goblin, Elementalists (Surtur, Sylph, Triton, Dverg), Dhampir, Woodwose and Seraph.

For my Eberron Remixed project, I had, of course, the four unique Eberron races: Kalashtar, Shifter (same as woodwose), changeling and warforged.

To me, the kalashtar are not interesting, and I don't want to get involved with Riedra/Sarlona; there's enough going on in Khorvaire already. Plus, the Quori are just insubstantial Lovecraftian horrors; I don't need a unique source for them if I really wanted to keep them. And they're heavily based on D&D psionics, which is a moot point for my remix. I'll almost certainly cut them entirely.

Compared to my earlier Eberron Remixed project, I actually have elves and dwarfs, although mine are a bit different than D&D's. I'll probably swap them 1 for 1, though. Not sure what I want to do with the other races yet; certainly replace halflings, gnomes, half-elves, orcs, half-orcs, etc. And orcs and goblins will of course replace hobgoblins and goblins. 

I'll still need to do a little bit of thinking on how to map the remixed races to the original races. Of course, it matters less in BLADES OF THE WOUNDED LAND, if that's what I end up calling it, but I want to gear Eberron Remixed 2e to lead into the more derived setting rather than contrast with it.

5e? 5e, yeah

I'm not an OSR guy, as I've said many times before, but that doesn't mean that some of the OSR's complaints about "modern D&D" aren't completely valid in relation to my own preferred way of playing. Saw this interesting rant on reddit and thought that I'd "fisk" it, just for fun.

5e is a Trojan horse designed to look closer to "old school", but only superficially. Playing it without previous knowledge, leads to a game that is very far from OSR.

It features: 

—characters that are complex at the start, instead of character that get complex over the course of the game (the ones who survive for long) as you have ~100 classes/subclasses + dozens of playable races, when accounting for all published rule books, each with their own unique little mechanics that nobody at the table knows about apart from the player who made them. Most of which are all flavor and no playtest.

I prefer characters to not be mechanically complex at all, but I don't have a problem with flat complexity. Many old games operate under similar expectations, including a lot of skill-based games like Call of Cthulhu and the rest of the BRP family, or GURPS, which I remember quite well from the 80s and 90s.

—a false declaration of intents, that the game is about exploration, combat and roleplaying with NPCs while lacking tools to support anything but combat, including not having reward mechanics but for combat, at least ones that are not just DM-fiat based (you can give characters "boons", whenever you feel like... Well, gee, thanks for authorizing me to do my job as a DM, I guess?) -so it also violates modern design principles, not just OSR.

I think its a category error to want or expect the game to provide mechanical support for everything that your characters are likely to do in game. On the other hand, if the game provides complex mechanics for some activity and nothing at all for others, then it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that the game is in any way about those things, at least at a designer level. That said, sometimes there is material, it just isn't mechanical. If there are campaigns that feature large keyed maps and lots of NPCs to interact with, then the game certainly is "about" social interaction and exploration even if there isn't mechanics for doing so. But there certainly is material for it.

Of course, that also gets into the questions of what is the game about when you're putting some of the support in optional supplements, but that's just pedantry, I think.

—combat that is slow as hell, due to action economy design in the combat round and character complexity (in the words of its own designer: "it's hot garbage"). Players can wait a long time for their turn to come up, and they usually get distracted in the meanwhile, not paying any attention to other players turns, then spend their turn deciding which little buttons they have on their character's sheet to push this round instead of thinking about the combat and being creative, and that's it.

—combat that is just a time-sink, as it is designed with the assumption that PCs will always triumph and come out of it with little to no consequence. Again, citing one of the the designers own words: you already know where combat will lead, it only takes 45 minutes to get there. Experienced DMs have always tried to "fix" this by throwing more lethal monsters than what the official encounter budgeting rules called for, bu[t] all encounters in official modules are designed around that principle. Combats have practically no lasting impact on the game: resources that characters spend are always temporary, easy to recover, including HPs. Death is markedly rare. And even XPs: most published modules ditch the concept of XP-per-monster-killed and use a milestone-based mechanic where characters level-up all together when they reach a new chapter of the (largely pre-written) story.

This is all very true. The last point, about XP isn't one that I care about, preferring arbitrary advancement to XP accounting myself but 5e combat feels to me like rehashed 3e combat. Very deja vu in terms of how combat operates, and yeah—it's long, often boring, very meta (especially when it goes into discussion of squares of movement, etc. and other board-gamey meta abstractions that take you out of immersion in the moment) and honestly not very exciting, interesting or fun. Which is kind of ironic, given how much its a focus of the game mechanics. Although curiously, now he's talking about the way modules are written, to my point above. "The game" is more than the core rules. But he's cherry-picking just a bit when to apply that logic.

—very little tools to support DMing, relying a lot on DM's improv capabilities, and counting on them doing a lot of heavy lifting for everything that is not combat. The tools it does provides are often based verbose descriptions about how to go about doing world-building, but no little actual tools (the polar opposite of games like Worlds Without Number).

This is a curious one too; I know that there are a few games within the OSR (the above-mentioned Worlds Without Number) that are explicitly toolkit-like, but that's hardly the way most OSR games work. Most OSR games provide very little tools to support DMs too, relying a lot on DM's improv capabilities, and counting on them doing a lot of heavy lifting for everything that is not combat. That's largely always been the case with D&D, and the explicit toolkit approach of some modern games is the anomaly. Some random monster tables and treasure generators notwithstanding. The tools available in early D&D weren't non-existent, certainly, but they weren't that robust.

It was always my understanding as a kid, and this hasn't changed in the last nearly 45 years or so since I've been playing, that that was the DM's role, that's largely what made DMing fun, even. Having too many or too proscriptive tools that took that task away from the DM and randomized it was kind of cheating. Not in the sense that you're cheating the players out of anything, but you're cheating yourself out of the best part of DMing. Nobody I knew as a youngster would have been very interested in running that way; I think that's a modern approach based on a philosophical alignment towards RNG and middle-aged guys wanting shortcuts because they don't want to spend the time coming up with stuff on their own anymore. Even what tools were available were only infrequently referenced or used.

But I've always said that in spite of its name and posture, the OSR is a modern movement within roleplaying.

—nowhere, in any manual that I know of, are procedures and tool on how to design and run a freaking dungeon. And the game is still called "DUNGEONS and Dragons", yes. This also includes most published modules, which contain little in terms of dungeons, in general (with a few exceptions, where they tried to leverage famous megadungeons of the past, like Undermountain and the Temple of Elemental Evil) and has gone progressively worse over the years, to the point the publisher now seems to be actively resisting the very idea of having dungeons with a map and a key in their modules, replacing it with a map (they look nice, after all) plus railroady descriptions who assume the PCs will always explore the dungeon in one specific way.

I dunno. He may be right, although I don't think so; the 5e campaigns that I've looked at have more than enough dungeons for my taste. But again, my dislike of dungeon-crawling is well-documented. If he is right, and I don't think I believe that he is, then that's not a strike against 5e at all, but rather against the OSR.

—Wilderness exploration is similarly underdeveloped, with no specific procedure for running hexcrawling, point-crawling or anything else besides mentioning travelling speeds and the idea that you use the Survival skill a lot. The DM is again left to fend for himself.

I think the OSR, or at least some portions of it that aren't into super rules-light non-D&D games, have purity spiraled into wanting mechanical procedures for way too much, and not wanting to do much beyond those procedures. Many of the tools that they use are either cobbled together from various games, supplements or even third party products. Curiously, they also still point to the space within the game without rules for the DM to do things his own way as one of the strongest aspects of the OSR. Sometimes you can't win for losing, especially if you're just complainy by nature.

I know that there's a very reasonable desire to have all that you need to run the game in one place, but I also feel like the complaint here is a bit unfair; most OSR games don't really provide too much of this all in one place either. ShadowDark's hexcrawl information is mostly in the Cursed Scroll zines, for instance. Even back in the day, when you wanted to add wilderness exploration to your game, you had to add Expert to your Basic box. 

If you want to hexcrawl, you certainly can in 5e, and you can find resources (for free, even) to do so without any trouble. It's mildly irritating that if you want to do it and want the rules right there in the DMG that they're not there, maybe. But again; the complaint is a little whiny sounding at this point. Hexcrawls and pointcrawls are not necessarily the only or best way to handle wilderness exploration, after all. Plenty of modern players aren't really super interested in doing either. And by modern, I mean guys like me who've been playing for 45 years.

—Very little in terms of hirelings management (it does have animal "companions" though) and stronghold building is a bolted-on, videogamey late addition to the game.

We didn't use these rules back in the 80s either. I know some people did, but the reason that these fell by the wayside is because this stuff wasn't really core to the game and never really caught on with the players, for the most part. This is an odd thing to complain about unless you're unable to envision D&D as anything other than exactly the game that you want it to be.

Gameplay is based on the DM supplying long-ass stories and weaving whatever characters the players will bring to the table with their three-pages-long backgrounds, often unrelated to the game world and campaign story, supplied at the start of the game, into it. Somehow. The characters complexity and players attachment to them often means that DMs are incentivized to provide a measure of plot armor for the PCs, which is reflected in the sportsy, videogamey, non-lethal combat system design, as to not frustrate players and to avoid having to find a way to weave new characters into an ongoing story. It also makes it more difficult to manage players absences -most groups I've played with refused to play a session if even one player was missing and makes downtime activities (codified only later, but at least present) something the DM needs to actively work towards by carefully managing plot hooks and ongoing events so the PCs have the time to stop in a hub and perform them.

That's not entirely untrue, I suppose, but those trends have nothing to do with 5e. Most of them were going pretty strong by the early 80s during the 1e and B/X and BECMI eras.

Again; the OSR isn't about rediscovering old-fashioned ways of playing, though. It's a modern movement that takes some old ideas but aligns them into a very modern philosophy and context that few players, if they could time-travel from the late 70s or early 80s would have recognized.

So, the game design seems to be built around the idea that the DM is not merely a referee for the players while they play, or, you know, a Dungeon Master, but a full-on entertainer working as writer, performer and director, and all good, fun 5e games I've run or have played in, came out good 100% because of DM's experience, skills and a bit luck despite the game and with little contributions from the players -not because they weren't trying but because the game does not support them doing much apart from designing new characters, leveling them up and using their powers in combat.

It's always been that way. The notion that 5e is unique here is whack. Long before 5e most of those items were dropped from the game because most other games never had them at all, and most D&D players never used them. 

DMing 5e is often a chore, with the overall expectation they will be a supplier of good stories and a good performer/director.

Which possibly also explain the rise in popularity of the paid-for DM.

It can be, but it doesn't have to be. The ability to actually understand how to effectively run a game without it being a chore is the whole point of experienced DMing. I think it's a bit rich for old-school, experienced DMs complaining that the game doesn't offer tools for inexperienced new DMs who don't have that experience. OK, well so what? Don't you have that experience? Don't you already have material from older versions that you can adapt? Why are you getting upset on behalf of other people who aren't upset by the very thing that you think that they should be upset about?

5e was touted and marketed as a "back to the origins" edition, after the 4e debacle -which, according to many, is not a bad game per sé, but it's an entirely separate experience from RPGs and especially from D&D, having being designed with the declared intent of being a clone of World of Warcraft, but at least it got way less managerial interference from Hasbro than 5e. But it's really not. It's quite clearly a direct descendant of 4e, but without the tactical freedom and a thin hand of paint to make it look a bit more AD&D 2e if you don't look at it under the light.

This one is kind of ridiculous. 5e is clearly a cleaned-up and somewhat simplified (on some axes, anyway) descendant of 3e. And in spite of its "primitive" core mechanics, 2e was clearly reaching in terms of supplements, design philosophy and playstyle into the modern era. I think a lot of OSR folks are in denial about what D&D was after about 1981-2 or so, just because the core mechanics didn't change too much, and the game could be played differently than it was presented, if desired. 

Guess what? Same is true for any other edition, or any other game too.

Overabundance of player options also create a bizarre "circus effect" where the official setting feels like nothing is special or magic, because everybody and everything is, always, reflecting the combat system (no teamwork, everyone is too focused on their own unicity to care for tactics and teamwork). That is also clearly depicted in the 2024 edition graphics, so, absolutely deliberate.

Speaking of 2e... that's exactly what 2e was famous (infamous) for throughout the 90s and 00s.

I think it falls quite a bit off OSR principles and aesthetics.

Fair enough, and true. Not really what the question that it was a comment to was asking (which was: Are character builds, like what we saw in 3.5, antithetical to OSR play style?) so I don't mind fisking it offline in a forum that isn't particularly pro-OSR.

Eberron Remixed, Second Edition

A few years ago, I had a lot of fun adapting Eberron to Dark Fantasy X as a remix of sorts. Of course, Dark Fantasy X has now evolved into Shadows of Old Night; and that's not just a change in name and a few superficial mechanical details (although it is also that.) More to the point, I've kicked off (and not yet finished) the High Fantasy X project as a fork of Shadows of Old Night, which is another temp name too like Dark Fantasy X was. Not yet sure what I'm going to rename HFX to, but in the meantime, I think it's worth pointing out one salient and interesting detail:

Namely that the setting of High Fantasy X is heavily and deliberately influenced by Khorvaire, the main continent of Eberron. It's also equally heavily and deliberately influenced by Heroes of Might and Magic III, my favorite old computer game from my college days in the latest 90s and early 00s. But one thing that I discovered, accidentally as I was tinkering with ideas for the HFX setting is that Heroes3 and Eberron actually match up shockingly well. All of the Eberron kingdoms (on Khorvaire)—or at least almost all of them—have shockingly close analogs in the factions of Heroes3, especially if you add some of the new Horn of the Abyss factions, like Cove. When I drew my first draft of the High Fantasy X map (which I still need to scan and post) it actually looked quite a bit like Khorvaire, and I was no doubt influenced in many ways both subconscious and conscious when I drew it, like putting the Necropolis-like kingdom in the same location (more or less) as Karrnath, and all of that. It's fair to say that the HFX map is a redrawn, slightly pruned, and renamed/relabeled version of Khorvaire.

This is, of course, because I quite like Eberron. I remixed it, and then I made a pastiche of it as a different setting too.

I kind of want to do two things, one as a step, if you will, to the other. First, I want to take my old Microlite20 Dark Fantasy X EBERRON REMIXED project and create an updated remix of it that more closely matches the HFX rules and races, etc. I'm not going to mess too much with the Eberron Remixed site; I'll leave that alone and redo the pages on it as blog posts with a new tag, EBERRON REMIXED 2e. This means that if I ever want to run Eberron (Remixed) I don't have to go back to an out of date and "primitive" version of my rules. Not that I think that I will ever do that, but y'know. It was fun to remix the setting, so why not remix it again, but better?

After I've done that, it'll be easier to continue transitioning to the even more dramatically "remixed" HFX. I don't consider that a remix at all, although of course it's a setting that is influenced very obviously in some ways by Eberron—except with a darker, Lovecraftian lens applied to it, among other changes. I hope by the time I get that far, that I've come up with a permanent name for High Fantasy X. But if not, I can continue to use the temporary name indefinitely, I suppose.

While, like I said above, the mechanics did change when I migrated from Microlite20 DFX to Shadows of Old Night, the changes are, actually, more modest than you'd think. Sure, sure... I added back in the missing D&D-style ability scores, and rounded out the skills to six as well. I also eliminated the classes, and have an a la carte Feats system which is basically a build-your-own class, just without that label. But what really will change more substantially is that Shadows of Old Night has more races (and a few different ones) than old Dark Fantasy X, which mean that I'll need to remap my Eberron races and nations a little bit to work in this new paradigm. That also gives me an opportunity to revisit some other remix changes that I made to see if they still hold up. Let me first list the races from High Fantasy X, which are a closer match to D&D in some ways—I've got elves and dwarfs back in, for instance—although less so in others, since just because I have elves and dwarfs doesn't mean that they're really exactly like D&D versions of the same, for instance.

I will need to redraw the map; if nothing else, I'd like to add two more minor nations, based (loosely) on Droaam (my remixed interpretation of it, anyway) and Q'barra, since HFX lacks any analog to those. I'll see HFX converge in some ways even closer to my new Eberron Remixed, which will in turn diverge even more from Eberron as printed. 

In any case, HFX lacks the Eberron specific races, so I need to decide what (if anything) to do with them: kalashtar, changelings, shifters and most iconically, war-forged; do I port them to HFX, or leave them off? Probably off, but we'll see. After all, otherwise, why wouldn't I just use Eberron Remixed 2e and not even bother doing HFX at all?

In any case, join me (or don't) as I go through this exercise to re-remix Eberron, and then find out how much of that remixing can translate into useable material for whatever HFX eventually transitions to.

No system

I sometimes call my "playstyle" paleo-trad, but I'm not sure that that's very clear, and even if it was, I wonder sometimes how accurate it really is. I certainly appreciate the priorities and concepts of trad style play, but I approach it from a rather old-fashioned, if decidedly not old-school, approach. But what exactly does that mean? What do I really want a game to do, and what's my ideal of a game? I'm more and more convinced that my tastes might be a bit more eclectic than I thought, and while I can tolerate plenty of design elements that aren't optimized for it, my ideal game is possibly quite different from what most other gamers might want the game to do. Let me go through the specific identified playstyles, from this earlier post, which in turn, of course, links to the original source. And talk about how aligned I am to that playstyle.

1. Classic - I never had much interest in this playstyle, which reached its peak during the phase when D&D was often run as a tournament game. D&D was essentially a complicated puzzle box with level appropriate challenges, puzzles, traps, riddles, etc. overtly in a dungeon that didn't demand any in-world context; it just existed for its own sake because the point of the game was to overcome the challenges.

Right away when exposed to the concept of D&D and roleplaying, I was caught up in the roleplaying aspect of it; the notion that you could have an experience similar to reading an immersive fantasy novel, except with an ensemble cast of characters, rapidly evolving improvisational stuff happening, and a prompt/reaction response creating the story. Like being in a fantasy novel as a kind of instant improvisational co-writer, responsible for your character(s). Classic style never even attempted to do this, and Gygax coming from a context of wargaming probably didn't even think of this at first, and when the so-called Dungeons & Beavers group started house-ruling the game to lean more into those goals, he denounced it as not the "correct" way to play. Of course, he also said frequently that the only correct way to play was what you wanted to do at your table. Gygax said a lot of things, and you have to take all of them with a grain of salt. He often contradicted himself, and often had blatantly obvious ulterior motives that call into question the accuracy and integrity of statements that he made.

Classic was probably an obvious, and maybe even the only possible first step in the evolution of roleplaying games out of wargames, given that the hobby started in wargames and not from some other hobby endeavor, but it didn't take long for people with other playstyle preferences to find it unsatisfying. I did almost immediately.

2. Trad - Trad, or traditional playstyle, was the first real systemic reaction against classic play, and by the early 80s it was pretty well established. Some other games, like Call of Cthulhu explicitly stated trad design goals, modules started changing their focus, and trade (and fan) magazines started calling the dungeon a tired, old-fashioned trope that was ready to be retired. That said, just because people knew what they wanted in the trad space doesn't mean that they really understood how to get there, and much of the early trad stuff, therefore, made some serious mistakes and created a lot of really bad games. Many of those bad habits are still, honestly, pretty commonplace, so lots of people who might not otherwise have a problem with trad think that they do because they've only ever played pretty bad trad games.

In my opinion, the primary goal of trad games is immersion of a realistic character in a realistic setting and realistic scenarios. For "fantasy" versions of realistic, of course. Trad games, in this sense, are often compared to a movie, TV show, novel or story. However, this doesn't mean that trad games should have predetermined outcomes, plots and even specific plot beats, although many trad games do indeed feature that, that's not necessarily a feature of trad, it's a concession to trad for people who don't otherwise know how to run a trad game well. Hence the prevalence of things like adventure paths and pre-written campaigns, which are often correctly characterized as pretty railroady. It's not that trad is railroady, it's that a lot of DMs can't run without having that kind of stuff already spelled out for them to regurgitate. The real goal of trad isn't to fill out a plot outline or plot structure, it's immersion. The characters need to feel real, the setting and scenarios need to feel real—again, within the confines of the fantasy setting—and really good DMs don't need to pre-write their scenarios and campaigns. Chris Perkins, who comes across as a woketard online, is regardless of that a talented GM by all accounts, and his old advice column, The DM Experience is a great example of how a trad game should be run. (In fairness, he's also got a good reputation as a nice and friendly guy in person. His social media is a wasteland of hate and insults, though, when he posts anything at all.)

One side effect of this, at least for me, is that I don't think a lot of trad players really care too much about the system. In fact, they kind of tend to dislike intense interactions with the system, as it is a meta reminder that they're playing a game, and it dampens immersion. I know that I don't. I don't get excited about systemic innovations that much unless the systemic innovation makes the roleplaying easier, more transparent, or more thematically appropriate... without developing enough complexity to take me out of the immersion and have to focus on the mechanics. Mechanics aren't inherently bad, but they need to be both easy and simple enough to be fairly transparent, while also contributing to the tone and theme of the game. It's a tall order, which is probably why I've been tinkering with them for decades before getting to where I want... and I still find innovations that work better than what I've got from time to time, so the tinkering will probably always continue.

I don't know that a lot of other trad players will necessarily agree with me on that one, though, because many of them probably do have their favorite systems, and their favorite systems might not be simple and easy. However, they probably are in the sense that they know their system well enough that it's transparent to them personally, so the effect is basically the same.

3. Nordic Larp - I don't know that this style is even real. I mean, I trust the guy who wrote this that it is, but it seems to exist in its own geographical or philosophical cul-de-sac, completely unrelated to what the rest of the RPG world is doing. I don't think it's relevant to our discussion.

4. Story Games - These, on the other hand, have become more prominent in recent years. One would think, based on prior classifications of roleplayer types, that people who like trad, like me, would probably like story games, but in point of fact, I have little interest in them. Story games are characterized by two things in particular that I disagree with; first a collaborative setting/world building approach between the players and the GM. I dislike this; there is clear sovereign territory between the roles of player and GM in the world I grew up in, and I prefer to leave it alone. Secondly, story games are characterized by narrative mechanics; meta-currencies and other things that allow players to force the game to do certain things due to narrative considerations. Not only does this also intrude into GM sovereign territory in an unwelcome way, but it's extremely meta, and forces a meta perspective on the game, which is completely contrary to the desires I have to be more immersed in the character, situation, scenario and setting (I need to find a synonym for character that starts with [s] so I can keep up that alliterative streak.)

I'm not completely against meta currencies; I liked Action Points well enough, and have an iterative version of the same idea in my game. But that's a pretty low-key metacurrency that doesn't take you out of what's happening; you just have a bonus that you can apply when you need it. And in my system, it's even more used (I would guess; if I were playing it, I'd hold on to it for this) as a "get out of death" card. Just in case, you can turn a character death into a near-death mauling and have him come back from the brink. That's technically a meta-currency, but not really what most people mean when they say that.

5. OSR - The OSR is really two things, but I'm kind on the fringe, at best, of both of them. The OSR as rulesets; well, I don't really love old D&D rules, and I haven't since they were still current D&D rules. The versions of the game that cleaned some of the crap up and made them run a little better are OK, though. But still not my first choice, or at least not without additional modification and tinkering. The OSR as a playstyle also has little interest to me with the exception that I prefer its focus on rulings over hard and fast rules, and I'm still interested in a less super-heroic pandering game that makes it nearly impossible for characters to die unless you just choose to let them do so. But it's certainly not worth it to me to get those things by also accepting some of the other parts that make the OSR what it is; focus on dungeon-crawling, gold = xp, deliberate failure to use any iteration of skills, preference for pixel-bitching and scenarios and settings that need to be pixel-bitched, etc.

I do, however, like the DIY aesthetic of the OSR, and always have, as well as its recent focus on relatively rules-lite yet functional mechanics. I don't really need it, but if I had to take some OSR or NSR ruleset and modify it slightly, or even just run it in a different context, it'd probably work well enough for me. ShadowDark or Knave 2e would probably be my first attempts to point to systems that could work.

6. Neo-Trad/OC - I have no interest in this emerging playstyle, which unlike Nordic Larp does seem to have some honest-to-goodness prominence. Powerful, entitled characters who aren't challenged and are really more into running a SIMs game that the DM crafts rather than a risky adventure game of any kind whatsoever are the hallmarks of this. I dislike the whole concept, and I dislike the rules that have emerged (like 5e) to cater to some of the needs of this style; like player-focused, DM-minimizing, overpowered overwhelming options. It's like the worst trends of munchkins and optimizers had a baby with the worst kinds of dysfunctional, entitled whiners who want the game to just give them exactly what they want as a kind of weird power-fantasy enabled by other players. I can't stand anything that is related to this playstyle at all.

- < † > -

All in all, it's fair to say that my "GM Merit Badges" page is still accurate. It doesn't use the same labels as the current discussion on play styles uses, but it still describes almost exactly what I like and how I like to do it.

And yeah, yeah... I recognize that the image above looks a little bit like playing with your grandma. I'm a Gen-X guy; I am a grandpa. It is what it is.

No Kings

There's a guy at work who was trying to get people to join one of his No Kings rallies this weekend. He didn't end up going, so as far as I know, nobody signed on. Not even sure if half of the people he invited even caught on to what he was asking them to do.

Can you imagine being so clueless and lacking in self-awareness that you call your protest "No Kings" after you 1) refused to hold a primary, 2) tried to anoint Kamala without a single vote, 3) tried to throw your opponent off the ballot through shady lawfare, 4) took all kinds of money from shadowy dark money NGOs who desire to pull the strings behind the scenes, and 5) most egregiously had one of your radical cultists literally assassinate people who voted for things that you didn't like? And this because the guy that you're accusing of being a "King" is trying to enforce the law that the majority of the populace strongly supports, and that majority is growing literally daily?

And these are the people who, when I say that Trump is at least the best president since Andrew Jackson ask "what about Lincoln or FDR?" No Kings indeed. You can't work with that kind of ignorance, but that kind of ignorance can only happen if you aggressively avoid trying to find out anything that contradicts your bougie cult beliefs.

Being a leftist with a straight face has got to be pretty hard these days. I'm sure that there are some ignorant suckers that make up this crowd; I even know some of them, but exactly how ignorant can you be and how much of a sucker to not start noticing that your stupid ideas about reality and actual reality don't line up? Maybe that's why they have so much anxiety and are prone to so much violence, actually. That cognitive dissonance makes them try to force reality to match their vision.

What a crazy time to be alive. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, the zeitgeist change is happening lightning fast, but I wish it would happen faster. The sooner this crazy left wing cult falls out of favor and is seen for what it is instead of a boutique prestige set of positional, luxury beliefs to virtue-signal to other would-be Cloud People, the better we'll all be.

UPDATE: Not really worth it's own post, but what does this look like online?

That's what I should have called Ad Astra / Space Opera X. I guess now I will... if I ever do anything with it again.

Vanze Maledictus

I still don't like the 5e system very much. But I admit that I'm having a pretty decent time in my current 5e campaign. It helps that we're focused on roleplaying, investigation and overland travel and aren't dungeon-crawling, of course. I like my character, although I feel like I need to get something a little bit ... I dunno, more to do with him as a roleplaying, character hook. But I like what I've got going on.

Here's some Hero Forge versions of him. The face-front pose makes him look like he has mom hips, so I rotated his head (and burning hands spell effect) a little bit to get a better pose.

Then, because he's about to go in disguise to infiltrate the Cult of the Dragon, I decided to give him a disguised version too, with his face covered.

I also have this model, who I call "the ghost collector". I have no idea what her deal is, but she's a hornless kemling girl, and I think I want to develop her as... someone. Maybe some kind of NPC expert that the PCs could potentially talk to about undead, or something.

UPDATE: Looking at those Vanze models, I feel like I need to move the eyes a little bit now too. Sigh.

Heroes 3

FYI. My announcement video from my other channel, Rando Calrissian.

I'm going to be doing a few things: 

1. Some more AI vs AI videos. Ostensibly to showcase the new (newish, I guess) Factory Town but also to mix it up with a few different heroes and terrains and stuff. The past series was pretty rigorous about attempting to level the playing field and just test the creature grown of each town against the creature growth of another. This time, I'll sorta do that, but relax the rigorousness a bit and do a few things just because I want to.
2. Showcase my customized Travis Savoie soundtrack and the various custom Hero portraits that I have while I'm at it. In fact, I need to do some major updates here on the ALTERNATE CHARACTER PORTRAITS tag as I've made a lot of updates to various characters since last posting there. Turned all of the minotaurs into sasquatches, for example, because I don't like the minotaur portraits of any of them. The more I change, the more bold in terms of actual changes I'm getting, I notice.
3. I should probably have another look at HIGH FANTASY X again, and maybe even consider renaming it, since my temporary X designation is gradually being phased out, starting (of course) with my main setting; DARK FANTASY X has been Shadow of Old Night for a while now. HIGH FANTASY X is the only other setting—well, that and SPACE OPERA X of course, although almost all of that was done when it had a different name anyway—that has a significant degree of work even done anyway. HFX is the one that I'm the most interested in seeing progress of the non-Shadow of Old Night settings.

The Browning of America

Ben Shapiro revealed something that he probably wishes that he could unsay a few years ago when he said, and I quote, "I don't give a damn about the browning of America." Well, sure you don't. Because you're a fake American. You certainly give a damn about the potential browning of Israel, don't you? But my, how fast the Overton Window can move! Conservative Inc. has gotten a new message, and rarely has it been so obviously coordinated, not grassroots or viral, and subject to a top-down strategic roll-out. Heck, the language is literally exactly the same from these so-called unrelated "influencers" of "Boomer Conservatism."

Sure, sure. Third World immigration. It's not not a problem. But what about repatriating the Jews? Nobody suggested that? And do Africans (via American slavery generations ago) count as Third Worlders? Questions begged and not answered. I'm not sure if they're really ready for this, but they also know that they can't hide behind their outdated civic nationalist pose anymore. 

UPDATE: Right on cue...

Rhûn and the Sutherland

Some Middle-earth maps have Haradwaith unlabeled; just the vague regions Near Harad and Far Harad. The original Christopher Tolkien map, however, is labeled Haradwaith (Sutherland) (Curiously, Forodwaith isn't ever labeled as Northerland, but y'know.) I don't really like the word Haradwaith or Haradrim a ton, so I prefer to use the English words of Sutherland and Southrons, or even Swertings.

But my favorite mystery in Middle-earth is the East; Rhûn. Lots of people want to assume that the east is like the Orient, and maybe it is if you go far enough, but the actual Easterlings that we're familiar with seem to be more like Scythians or Slavs, or at the most exotic, Huns, Magyars, or Bulgars, etc. Sadly, Tolkien told us relatively little about the East, and much of what he told us is wildly out of date by the time of the War of the Ring; we don't even know if the Sea of Rhûn (probably not it's real name, since Rhûn just means "East") is a remnant of Helcar or not. There's a vague reference to the Red Mountains in discussions about dwarves, and that they're at least as far east from the Misty Mountains as the Blue Mountains are west of them. However, that would put them pretty much (at the nearest) on the eastern edge of the map. So it's interesting to see these two maps. One of them is done by Amazon for their stupid Second Age show, and the other one is of... unknown provenance (at least to me). So, I know that this depiction of mountains, hills and forests in Rhûn are not canonical. But they are, at least, plausible, so I like them both.

UPDATE: Sorry; the original Christopher Tolkien map did have Haradwaith labeled. It was the revised Christopher Tolkien map that did not. The original map also had Forodwaith in small labels with Northern Waste as the bigger label for that same area.

Corsairs and Variags

I don't talk about Tolkien all that much on this blog, but of course Tolkien is my real first love when it comes to the fantasy genre. Not the first real fantasy that I read—that would be Lloyd Alexander—but Tolkien quickly rose to the top and stayed there for four decades. One of the things that always fascinated me with Tolkien's work, of course, was the world-building, particularly digging into what we could with offhand references and notes on maps of places and peoples that we otherwise know little about. I want to talk briefly about two such today; the Corsairs of Umbar and the Variags of Khand.

But first, some context. Tolkien was very clear—although it takes several sources to get all of the details about it—that during the Second Age, Numenorean settlements along the coast were plentiful. After the fall of Numenor, we also got the Exiles who set up their kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor, which of course are the protagonist nations of the series, but these other Numenorean realms persisted, at least for a time, as well. We know that many of them existed, but that they were opposed to Gondor and Arnor, at least politically and to some extent religiously and culturally, as they became the Black Numenoreans... descendants of the King's Men who were more hostile to the Eldar and the worship of the Valar. It's also stated in a few spots that the majority of the King's Men (who were the majority of the Numenoreans) were "Hadorian" of the House of Hador; the tallest, most populous and most notable house of the Edain. They were famous for their fair skin, blue eyes and blond hair as well. Although Numenoreans of the Third Age and later are typically depicted as dark-haired, this is because the Faithful, who made up the populations of Arnor and Gonder were much more heavily weighted towards Beorian Numenoreans, not Hadorian Numenoreans. Prior to the sinking of Numenor, the Faithful had visited Lindon and founded Pelargir; they maintained a much more northern presence on the coastlines of Middle-earth, while the King's Men settled along the south, where Umbar was their most northerly settlement. Black Numenoreans would also have been very tall, perhaps even taller, and more likely to be blond and blue-eyed rather than dark hair and gray-eyed. At least as long as their genetics remained more or less unmixed with men of Middle-earth.

Ar-Pharazon, the most infamous of the Kings for which the Kings Men were known, showing off the typical Numenorean phenotype before the sinking of Numenor.

This is all very interesting, because while Tolkien says that the Black Numenoreans—King's Men who didn't sink with the island or invade Valinor—remained an ethnic group in Middle-earth for some time. He says also that they dwindled and became mixed with other men (although the same happened to the Dunedain—it seems to be implied that the King's Men did it more comprehensively or more quickly, perhaps) but Black Numenoreans remained an identifiable ethnic group all the way through the Third Age, when the so-called Mouth of Sauron is identified as one. It's not clear what is meant by being "diminished or mingled"; that their numbers diminished? Their lifespan? Their knowledge and high culture? Their height (I'm only being partially flippant here.) And were some of them diminished and some mingled, or were they all either diminished or mingled? I think it's likely that what happened was similar to what happened to the Gondorians in that all of those happened to some degree, while still maintaining at least a core of Numenorean culture and genetic continuity, although their knowledge and power faded due to the natural entropy of Middle-earth. 

Famous offhand reference Queen Beruthiel (the one with the cats) was wife (for a time) of Tarannon Falastur, the first of Gondor's so-called "Ship-kings" and was also a Black Numenorean, although obviously many centuries earlier than the Mouth of Sauron. I had thought it most likely that she was from Umbar, which was later absorbed into Gondor itself shortly after the reign of Tarannon for many years, but what little we know of her is that she didn't seem to like being by the coast, which would be unusual for someone raised in a coastal city, so maybe there were other strongholds still of Black Numenoreans at that time that still held on to a Numenorean ethnic identity. If so, none of them are named, and their existence is only vaguely hinted at. Umbar, being located in the south, was frequently associated with neighboring Haradrim, of course, but it's important to note that Haradrim was not an ethnic designation but a geographic one (as was Easterling, for that matter) and meant at least two ethnic groups that we know of for sure, mentioned in the Battle of Pelennor Fields, and probably many others, especially depending on the time in which the reference is made.

Umbar's Numenorean cultural and genetic identity was changed and probably also strengthened and maybe even somewhat renewed with Gondorian rebels from the civil war known as the Kin-strife. In fact, the Corsairs of Umbar are specifically associated with these rebellious Gondorians, but it seems very unlikely that a mingling of Gondorian rebels, older Black Numenoreans and other associated southerners of some kind or other didn't all create the Corsairs of later. The Kin-strife happened a good 1500-1600 years before the War of the Ring, and the Corsairs that Aragorn met were probably considerably changed from the Corsairs that killed King Minardil in the 1600s. But it's also reasonable to assume that a strong element of Numenorean culture and even genetics still persisted in Umbar. But the Corsairs themselves are specifically associated with the Gondorian rebels who followed Castamir. Although of course, they were following in the footsteps of previous inhabitants of Umbar who did the same thing.

The Corsairs of Umbar are often associated with the Barbary Corsairs of the late 1700s by many fans as an analog from the real world, but given that Tolkien never really did anything that "modern" (except some elements of familiar Shire culture) and he also specifically mentioned dromunds as ships that they sailed, it seems that they'd be more like the Vandals of the Vandalic War against the Byzantines in the early/mid 500s. In fact, I think it's intriguing to wonder how much Tolkien had the Vandalic Kingdom in mind in general when envisioning the Corsairs, but if so, it again strengthens my suspicion that they shouldn't be seen as "too Semitic" in nature, but rather more like a rebellious mirror image, in some small way, to Gondor itself. 

The next topic is another one that's fascinated me for a long time; the Variags of Khand. Variag is a very interesting word, and I'm sure if Tolkien picked it, he did so very deliberately. Variag (or Varyag) is a transliteration (from Cyrillic) of the Slavic word for Varangian. Varangian is an Anglicization of an old Norse word væringi which had cognates in most Germanic languages: Old English wærgenga, Old Frankish wargengus, Langobardic waregang, a compound that meant "sworn companion" or, more casually, bodyguard. This tradition goes back a long ways; the Julio-Claudian dynasty of early Imperial Rome had the Cohors Germanorum or Batavorum (referencing the specific tribe that most of them were drawn from), after the ambush at Teutoburg Forest it was disbanded, but the idea persisted and subsequent later Roman Emperors or even lesser figures had them. Herod the Great, the tyrant of Judaea famously during the time of Jesus birth had a 2,000 guard force called the Doryphnoroi who had a Thracian, Gallic and Germanic contingent. The idea that these barbarians were 1) great fighters, 2) lacking in political ties to enemies at home and therefore more trustworthy, and 3) high in honor and bound to their sworn word was a big part of the draw, and after the Empire split, the Byzantine half famously reinstated the Varangians. It was initially founded by Swedish Vikings that came through the Viking settlement of Kievan Rus', who may indeed have used the word to denote the Scandinavians as a specific culturo-ethnic group. It's unclear how Scandinavian the Rus' remained, however; within just a couple of generations, their leaders had Slavic names, and it's clear that to at least some degree, they "went native" and merged with the local Slavic population. But it's also clear that they maintained some Viking culture for quite some time as well, and the word does connote a legion of foreigners as a professional army of sworn soldiers. The Varangian Guard, when formed in "Greece" (Byzantium) was started amongst the Kievan Rus', but recruits from Scandinavia were plentiful, and the essentially Scandinavian character of it was remarked on for many years still. In fact, so many Scandinavians went to earn money in Greece that Scandinavian kings actually started passing laws to discourage people from doing it to maintain a population at home!

After the Norman conquest of England, the ethnic nature of the Varangians changed, and many Anglo-Saxons went to Greece, to the point where it was later characterized as a specifically "English" organization.

Of course, if Tolkien had wanted to emphasize that, he could have used an Angliziced word, like Waring or something. But he specifically used a Slavic version of the word. I think that that's significant. Khand is mentioned much earlier than the War of the Ring, of course. There's an episode in the Appendices, given even more detail in Unfinished Tales that discusses the Wainriders and their subsequent descendants the Balchoth who swept in from the east on chariots, and had savage women who sometimes fought in their horde. All in all, they strongly resemble the various Scythian tribes, most especially the Sarmatians, who were famous for their warrior-women, although honestly the warrior women were probably indifferent archers and more like mascots for the real warriors rather than a threat to be taken seriously. These Wainriders first attacked the Northmen of Rhovanian, who at the time were at a more primitive "Gothic" level (at least, two of them are given Gothic names). Tolkien also suggested that some Northmen fought with the Easterlings, either in hopes of plunder, or to further their own petty feuds between various chieftains. After preying on the Northmen for a time, they invaded Gondor's easternmost frontier, where they were eventually beaten and pushed back. However, they seem to have moved around the eastern frontier of Mordor, fought the peoples of Khand for a time, but then joined forces with them to create a much more serious threat to Gondor. They were eventually defeated, and their bodies became yet another layer in the Dead Marshes. 

Khand, as you no doubt already know, is located directly to the southeast of Mordor. Not all of Mordor is like the part that we see in the films and books; volcanic wastelands and stuff. In fact, outside of the Plateau of Gorgoroth, most of Mordor is described (vaguely) as fertile farmlands on the banks of the Sea of Nurnen, albeit unhappy because whomever it is that lives there were peoples who were enslaved until Aragorn specifically freed them at the end of the War of the Ring, and gave them the land that they had farmed as freemen and allies of Gondor. Khand allied, as noted above, with both the Wainriders from the East and some kind of southerners from Near Harad (who knows, maybe even including some Black Numenoreans), but they curiously were not called Variags there, just "the peoples of Khand". It wasn't until the Battle of Pelennor Fields that we're given the term Variags of Khand. 

Many people (including Middle-Earth Roleplaying by I.C.E. assumed that the Variags were some kind of ethnic group of exotic peoples, but I doubt that Tolkien would have used the (relatively) familiar word Variag to describe them in that case and avoided using it in another context to describe the peoples of Khand; he was very deliberate in his word choice, especially for words that had a specific, historical or linguistic meaning. Therefore, I think the most likely explanation for the Variags is that they were, like the Varangians who had another version of their same name, renegade Northmen who came to Khand through the eastern (Slavic?) lands to serve as a kind of "French Foreign Legion" or Cohors of some kind in Khand.

The Easterlings of the movies were even more bizarre than the Corsairs, and much less likely to be anything at all like Tolkien described them. While there could be some call to assume that Tolkien was inspired, at least partly, by historical descriptions of Huns, Mongols or the Golden Horde or whatever, the Wainriders and Balchoth have a very specifically Scythian-like description to them, and the Easterlings of the Battle of Pelennor Fields are described as a "new type" of Easterling that the men of Gondor weren't familiar with, notable for being bearded like dwarves and carrying axes. Perhaps ironically, the completely unrelated Easterlings of the First Age bear a much more notable resemblance to Huns, specifically in how they're described and what kinds of names they bear, whereas in my minds' eye the Easterlings of the War of the Ring are like axe-wielding, bearded Cossacks.

All in all, I think Tolkien gave Middle-earth a much more European cast than most people are willing to assume nowadays. There's no reason to make anyone in Middle-earth with the possible exception of some of the Haradrim, especially of Far Harad, to look anything like Africans, for instance, and there's no reason to make anyone look like Huns, Mongols, Magyars, or anyone else that's from beyond Europe's sphere. The Corsairs are primarily Numenoreans, with an unknown amount of mixing with anonymous peoples of Near Harad, who are described as looking somewhat Greek or Carthaginian when they make a minor appearance in The Lord of the Rings, and the Easterlings have some vague yet tantalizing hints that most of them were meant to represent Scythians (earlier) Slavs (Variags?) or even renegade eastern Vikings who happened to be on the wrong side of their distant cousins the Rohirrim and men of Dale. 

Three Questions

I don't actually watch a ton of Questing Beast, because I'm not a fan of the OSR as playstyle approach that he promotes, I don't agree with it, and I'm not necessarily interested in a lot of his content. But, I do occasionally check in to see if anything's going on there that I might be interested in. Saw this video recently:

Now, I'm not a famous D&D Youtuber, and nobody cares what I think, but I'm going to answer these three questions anyway, because I'm a sucker for answering trendy questionnaires, or even under the radar questionnaires. I like my own voice.

1. What is your favorite system to run? to play?

I actually don't perceive a dichotomy between running and playing. If I like a system, I probably want to run and play it equally. I'd prefer my own system to run, obviously, and while I'd also prefer to play it, I'd not be surprised to never actually do so. But any rules-lite dark fantasy/horror game would do. I'd probably recommend ShadowDark without a focus on dungeoneering or hexcrawling, or Knave 2e or Microlite (any of the D&Dish ones) as plausible alternatives to my system. Probably Deathbringer when Professor Dungeon Master finally releases the full version would work too.

What I'd really like to do is to play loose adaptations of famous campaigns, adventure paths or at least settings using a dark fantasy rules lite game like this. The Enemy Within campaign from Warhammer FRP, Carrion Crown and maybe some of the other Paizo adventures, the Shadows of the Last War series of modules (including the one in the original setting book) for Eberron, etc. Something like that. Shorten them, get rid of most of the dungeon-crawling, if any (Enemy Within has very little) and adapt races, monsters and whatever to a good analog without worrying too much about getting it exactly right, and good to go. Or Bob's your uncle, or whatever.

2. What else would you want your channel (blog in my case, although I also have channels) to cover besides RPGs?

Well, I mean, I already do talk about other things. I talk a fair bit about current events and political and social trends, but I wouldn't really want to devote a chunk of time to that. I like history, or really pseudo-history; the interpolation of unwritten history using archaeology, archaeogenetics and historical/comparative linguistics, for instance. I also really like hiking, camping and other outdoorsy topics, especially out west. What I'd really love to do in an ideal world that could never be, is where I'd spend about a third of my time overlanding, in an overlanding truck with a rooftop tent, a drone, camp stove, etc. On these trips, I'd caravan with some gamer friends. We'd spend the better part of a day driving on a BDR or other cool outdoorsy place, then set up camp, stay there for two nights. The second day would be split between hiking and gaming in the great outdoors. My channel would be every other video would be about the travel, the hiking, the driving, the scenery, etc. and would be a relatively shortish (half hour or so, mostly?) montage of getting somewhere, showing off awesome scenery, setting up camp and hanging around cooking and talking and adventuring. Then the other video would be an actual play, edited down to 90 minutes or so. Maybe I could even get two actual plays out of a single play session. 

I'd have to think about set up so that we could have and record actual plays outside in the afternoon or early evening and have decent sound, not have our papers blow away, etc. But once I dial that stuff in, it'd be a pretty unique take; actual gaming in the great outdoors. In the summer I can be at high elevation in the mountains of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Montana, Idaho, etc. in the shoulder seasons at lower elevations, and in the winter, we go to the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico or southern California.

3. What strong opinion did you used to have that you've changed about RPGs over the years?

Not really any that are super significant. My playstyle is the same. I've dialed in what kind of rules I prefer, though. The closest I can think of is that while I've always liked a breezy toolz not rulez approach, I used to like the chargen options of rulesy systems like 3e or Pathfinder 1e, because I could use them to detail and even develop my character in unexpected ways, giving him unusual details that made him stand out. I no longer feel that that's necessary or important, but honestly that didn't change much about how I played or ran the game, I just used to use it to prompt unexpected little details about characters sometimes, by spending extra skill points on unexpected things, or picking a feat or trait of some kind that gave me a hook to roleplay on. However, I now no longer feel like those systems are worth that benefit. 

Reading and trip progress

I should be cleaning out my email inbox after just getting back in the office, but I've already talked to people, so I know what the priorities are, so it's just a cleanup process. Not super important or at least not super urgent. In the meantime, let me give a quick update!

I was gone for almost two weeks. I left on a Friday evening, and got back on a Tuesday very late evening almost two weeks later. Flew to Seattle, took a day and a half there, too a 7-night Alaskan cruise, and then came back to Seattle for another day and a half. Seattle was unusually nice; sunny and bright the whole time I was there, and mostly pretty clear; I had good views of the Olympic Mountains, Mt. Rainier and even Mt. Baker most of the time, up near the Canadian border. Alaska, on the other hand, was non-stop rainy, and kind of cool. When you're wet, even reasonably nice temperatures feel cold, and that's kind of what ended up happening to us most of the time. We had a lot of fun. It was my wife's first time to both Washington and Alaska, but my third (and fourth, since we came, left and then came back again) to Washington and my second to Alaska. 

Weather was terrible in Alaska; as it often is, but I enjoyed the Tongass National Forest. While I'd never want to live there, the natural surroundings and history of the area were still fascinating to me. If I ever develop the area in the northwest corner of my map; the Kindattu Mountains and the coast from Dagan Bay up to the edge of the map heading towards Kurushat, that's the terrain I'll use. Ironically, the peninsula around Dagan Bay, which would here somewhat resemble the Salish Sea, I guess, is supposed to be pretty dry; the exact opposite of the Olympic Peninsula. Maybe I can have a thin line of temperate rain forest along the coast before high cliffs that act as a rain shadow or something. Or maybe I just make it a little further north that the climate is wet. It's not like a mapped a jet stream, or anything. 

The trip wasn't as relaxing as I would have liked, but that's mostly because my idea of a relaxing vacation is sitting in the sun with mountains in the background, music playing in the background, and a good book and a bottle of Mt. Dew in hand. My wife thinks sleeping in, watching TV and taking a long time to do things like get ready for the day, eat breakfast, etc. is relaxing. It's not completely compatible, so I brought more to read than I needed, and ultimately feel less relaxed and decompressed than I'd have liked. We kind of had two incompatible goals; spend a lot more time with each other, almost intensely, and relax was the second goal. But to relax and decompress, I really need time on my own. So, one necessarily had to give way somewhat to the other goal. I did, however, read a fair bit. I guess that's just down to my personality. I can't relax and decompress very well unless I'm by myself, and I wasn't very much on this trip, so I should have known that that particular goal was going to fall short.

I finished my Horror in the Museum collection; all (or at least most) of the stories that H.P. Lovecraft revised, edited, or flat-out ghost-wrote. Surprisingly, I'd never read some of these, including really iconic ones like... "Horror in the Museum." I'm pretty sure that I've read "The Curse of Yig" before and I know I'd read "The Mound" before, but there were a few gems that I hadn't ever read. Of course, most of the "secondary revisions" in the back 25-30% of the book he spent less effort on, and for the most part, I liked them less. They came across as pretty standard, forgettable, run-of-the-mill pulp ghost stories from the 20s and 30s. Nothing special. But "The Last Test" and "Out of the Aeons" were particularly good, as was, of course, "The Horror in the Museum." "The Mound" is really more of a bunch of name-checking than it is a really good story, but it's got a lot of really good ideas.

After that, I wasn't sure what to read, but I had ended up at, literally the last minute, tossing the three Book of the Damned Pathfinder sourcebooks in my bag, and I finished Princes of Darkness and Lords of Chaos, as well finishing after getting home Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I think I threw these in because I started the 5e expansion of the old 3e book Book of Fiends by Green Ronin (which, in spite of what their founder says, is not pronounced Green Roneen. I'm sorry; ronin is already an established word in the English language with an established pronunciation. You don't get to change it.) That's an excellent book, or at least the 3e version was, and until the official books Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells came out, it was the best work in D&D on the big bad guys. 

Curiously, of course, you'll note that it has devils and demons, but not the "other guys". Because of AD&D's dumb 9-point alignment system, D&D has always made a big deal of the difference between chaotic evil and lawful evil fiends. It's fine to have two "tribes" or "camps" of evil outsiders that work using different methodology, I suppose, but not exactly classic. And the "regular evil" guys have always been an afterthought. Demons and devils were in the AD&D Monster Manual, but the "daemons" were in the Monster Manual II, and just didn't catch on the same way. The fact that they're named daemons is part of it; daemon is exactly the same word as demon and is even pronounced the same way. It would be like saying that Gandalf the Gray is a totally different guy than Gandalf the Grey. Just dumb. Although, kinda like Chris Pramas deliberately mispronounced ronin, a lot of D&D players mispronounce daemon. The oinodamon, for instance. The piscodamon. The Matt Damon. Guess what? That's not how you pronounce daemon. It's just a British spelling for the same word. Gray vs grey. Color vs colour. Traveler vs traveller. You don't pronounce them differently.

Of course, in 2e, they renamed demons and devils (eventually) as tanar'ri and baatezu respectively, and daemons as yugoloths. While demons and devils (mostly) got their names back, the daemons didn't. And in 3e they were also relegated to the Monster Manual II (I believe; maybe it was the Fiend Folio) and they remained an also ran. Some third party supplements added many AD&D daemons back into the game, as 3PP content. But it's worth pointing out that nothing with these guys ever really struck gold and stuck the same way that classic demons and devils did. Book of Fiends took a totally different tack and tried to create daemons that were separated into the Catholic seven deadly sins after some manner. Paizo decided to pattern them after the Four Horsemen, although most people do not do the Four Horsemen correctly; there is no pestilence, there is conquest. I suppose to many, conquest and war seem too similar for them to make a meaningful distinction, but that's because they try to divorce the concept from Christianity, where conquest means the tyranny of antichrist.

Both of these concepts work better, in my opinion, than the AD&D concept (Gandalf the Gray), but I don't know that they manage to rise to the level of really classic demon lords, archdevils, or even just some of the basic demons and devils, for that matter. But it's been fun to see these three very similar but also distinctly different fiendish cosmologies for official D&D 3e (Book of Vile Darkness which I read a few weeks ago), Green Ronin's stuff from Book of Fiends and Paizo's Book of the Damned. I guess if I wanted to have a really comprehensive review, I could also read the 3.5 updates in the Fiendish Codex series (I'm actually planning on doing just that) and maybe even the updated Paizo Book of the Damned book. I think that that's mostly the same as what it was before, with just a few minor changes and updates, but I don't know for sure, because I haven't ever read it.

Oh, one more thing. I also read most of an Eberron novel, Voyage of the Mourning Dawn by Rich Wulf. It's part of a trilogy, and I'll probably read all three of them in relatively short order. Like most game fiction I've read, it's not... great, but it's not bad, just kind of forgettable, albeit entertaining enough. We'll see how well I do with it the next few days. I'm pretty busy through the weekend, and my sleep schedule has been way off due to the four time zones that I crossed. Blegh. I'd really like to finish that book, and my Greek mythology one sooner rather than later, though.